The SHAPE of Flu

In the first episode of our new series, Jack is joined by PhD student Bernadeta Dadonaite from the University of Oxford to hear about how the flu virus arranges its genome inside the virus particle. Bernadeta studied the flu genome structure by using a technique called 'SHAPE-Map', which stands for: Selective 2'-hydroxyl acylation analyzed by primer extension - Mutational profiling. This is essentially a tool to figure out how a molecule like RNA folds.